Betrayers (Nameless Detective Novels)

by Bill Pronzini

  “Nobody gave it to me.”

  “Then how did you get it?”

  “I . . . found it.”

  “Found it where?”

  “I can’t tell you. I promised.”

  “Promised who, if you found it?”

  Silence.

  “Did some boy give it to you? A boy at school?”

  Silence.

  “Emily, answer me. Did a boy give you this box? Do you have a boyfriend you haven’t told us about?”

  “No.”

  “So it wasn’t a boy. One of your girlfriends?”

  Headshake.

  “Carla? Jeanne?”

  Headshake.

  “Kirstin?”

  “Nobody. I found it.”

  Kerry glanced at me; the frustration in her face mirrored what must have been showing in mine.

  My turn. I said, “Emily, you remember the talk we had about drugs?”

  “I remember.”

  “You said you understood how dangerous they are, how much damage they can do. You swore you’d never use them.”

  “I do understand. I’ve never used drugs, not any kind, and I never will.”

  “Then explain the box.”

  “I already did, Dad. I found it.”

  “Where?”

  “I can’t tell you that. I promised.”

  “You keep saying that. Why would you make such a promise?”

  Silence.

  I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Reason wasn’t working, and reason was the best way to deal with Emily on any subject. Threats, even if I believed in that kind of parental approach, wouldn’t work, either. You couldn’t force a girl like her into submission and confession. Punishment, constant badgering, would only cause her to withdraw.

  It was already starting to happen; I could see it in the way she was sitting, eyes remote, face pale, shoulders hunched. Same hurt look, same unwillingness or inability to communicate, same form of self-defense, as when she’d first come to live with us—a fragile kid, badly damaged by the violent deaths of her parents and the lonely existence their sins had forced her to lead. Lost and hiding in a place deep inside herself that no one could reach. The fact that she’d been a near witness to an incident not long afterward, in which I’d been ambushed and nearly killed, had made her situation even worse: she’d had so much loss in her young life, she couldn’t bear the thought of any more.

  It had taken months of patience to bring her out of herself, to earn her complete trust. We had it now. Trust, loyalty, unconditional love. She was happy, much more outgoing and better socialized, with a bright future ahead of her. But she was still young and fragile; not enough time had passed for her wounds to fully heal. If we pushed her too hard, punished her too severely, we could drive her right back into that inner twilight world. We could lose her again.

  And yet a thing like this, drugs, misplaced loyalty . . . we couldn’t just ignore it or tiptoe around it. I glanced again at Kerry. Her expression said she was thinking along the same lines.

  She said, “Emily, I know you understand why we’re upset, why we’re asking all these questions. Don’t you have anything to say?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “For bringing drugs into this house.”

  “Yes. I swear I’ll never do it again.”

  “Well, that’s a start.”

  “Are you going to search my room again when I’m not home?”

  “Not if you don’t give us any cause to.”

  “I won’t. Is it all right if I have the box?”

  “. . . What?”

  “Not what’s in it. Just the box.”

  “Why? Does it have some special meaning to you?”

  “No. May I have it?”

  “To do what with?”

  “Give it back.”

  “To who?”

  “The person it belongs to.”

  “So you know who lost the box.”

  “I . . . Yes.”

  “And you told this person you found it.”

  “Yes. But not that I opened it.”

  “Are you going to say that we did? That we know about the cocaine?”

  “No, but I won’t lie if I’m asked. May I have it?”

  “No,” I said, “you may not.”

  Emily started to say something, changed her mind. There was misery in her expression now, as if her emotions had begun to give her physical pain. Half a minute ticked away, during which time Shameless the cat wandered in and hopped up next to her. She clutched at him, pulled him close—something warm and furry to hang on to. Then, in a small voice, “May I be excused now?”

  I melted a little. It wouldn’t do any of us any good to keep her sitting there, keep hammering at her to no avail and watching her suffer. “All right, go ahead, but we’re going to talk again later. I want you to think about telling the whole story when we do, think very hard.”

  “I won’t break my promise, Dad. I can’t do that.”

  Up and out of the room she went, carrying Shameless, her steps slow and not quite steady. I had the feeling that as soon as she was inside her room with the door shut she would start to cry. Soundlessly.

  Kerry said, “Oh, Lord. You think she really did find that box?”

  “She said she did and she doesn’t lie.”

  “Then who is she protecting? Some boy?”

  “I hope not.”

  “She’s only thirteen. What if she’s gotten herself involved with somebody older? What if she’s already started having sex—”

  “Hey. Don’t go there.”

  “Don’t tell me the thought hasn’t crossed your mind.”

  “. . . All right. But you be the one to ask her if it comes to that.”

  “I will.”

  “She won’t admit to anything if it means breaking her promise.”

  “Oh, Lord. That damn teenage code: don’t break promises; don’t snitch.” Kerry leaned across the table between our chairs, touched my hand. Her fingers were cold again. “What’re we going to do?”

  “I don’t know. We can’t force her to talk to us; we can’t threaten her—you saw the way she looked.”

  “Calling up her friends’ parents or talking to her teachers isn’t the answer, either. All that’d do is open up a huge can of worms, with no guarantee of results.”

  “And turn her against us, drive her back inside herself.”

  “Well, we can’t just pretend this didn’t happen,” Kerry said. “We have to get to the bottom of it. We have to do something.”

  Something. Sure. But what?

  7

  JAKE RUNYON

  Since his relocation from Seattle to S.F. he’d spent a lot of time exploring and learning things about the city’s neighborhoods, particularly the ones that presented potential dangers when you had to venture into them after dark. Dolores Park, the hub of the upper Mission District residential area, was one of these.

  The park, two blocks long, one block wide, had steeply rolling lawns, acres of shade trees, winding paths, tennis courts, soccer field, kids’ playground, dog-play area. People came from all over the city on weekends to take advantage of its attractions. In the late eighties and early nineties well-off Yuppies, lured by scenic views of the Mission and downtown and an easy commute, had bought up and renovated many of the old Victorians that rimmed the park.

  Nice neighborhood . . . until the drug dealers moved in.

  Pot sellers at first, targeting the students at nearby Mission High School, then another, rougher element dealing heroin, coke, meth. As many as forty dealers had been doing business in Dolores Park day and night in those days, Bill had told him. And where you had hard drugs, you also had high stakes and violence; Runyon had seen it happen in Seattle when he’d been on the job there. One year there’d been eight shootings and two homicides in and around Dolores Park. Plus the fire-bombing of the home of a young couple who had tried to form an activist group to fight the dealers. Plus muggings, burglaries, intimidation of
residents.

  The SFPD and the city’s park police had finally cracked down, cleaned the dealers out of the park and out of the Mission Playground down on 19th Street as well. Things had been quiet and stable again for a while. Then new problems started up. First it was homeless people camping in the park at night, panhandling aggressively by day. Then, recently, large groups began showing up on weekends and holidays, sanctioned and unsanctioned by the city: peace rallies, loud music festivals, freewheeling private parties that spawned public drunkenness, rowdy behavior, seminude sunbathing, loads of strewn trash, and damaged facilities and park property. The residents were up in arms again, for all the good it was doing. Most of them reportedly stayed out of the park on weekends and especially at night. Even with the hard-core dealers and homeless people gone, Latino gangbangers from the Mission and other lowlives still prowled it and muggings were not uncommon.

  Few people were out on the lawns and paths when Runyon parked across the street on 19th. Too cold today, with the sea wind bringing in late-afternoon fog that hid the cityscape views behind tattered folds of gray. The Queen Anne Victorian that belonged to Arletta and Coy Madison was two doors down, its blue-on-blue paint job bright and fresh looking. Runyon went up the stoop, rang the bell. ID’d himself to the woman’s voice that came through a speaker box.

  There was a long pause before she said, “All right, I’ll come down.” She didn’t sound too happy about it.

  Pretty soon the door opened on a heavy chain and a narrow eye peered out at him through the aperture. He held his license up so the eye could read it. One blink was the only reaction.

  She said, “What are you, a bounty hunter?”

  “No. My agency operates on a straight fee basis.”

  “Same thing, if you’re working for Troy’s bondsman.”

  “It’d be easier if we could talk inside, Mrs. Madison.”

  “I can’t tell you anything. Have you spoken to my husband?”

  “Before I came here.”

  “If he doesn’t know where Troy is, why do you suppose I do?”

  “I don’t suppose anything,” Runyon said. “I just have a few questions.”

  She thought about it for ten seconds. Then she said, “Oh, all right, you may as well come in,” and the chain rattled, the door opened all the way.

  The rest of what went with the narrowed eye was older than Coy Madison, somewhere around thirty-five. She had an angular face dominated by a long, almost spadelike chin. Long brown hair was raggedly cut, as if she’d done it herself with a cracked mirror. She wore a not very clean smock over a man’s Pendleton shirt and a pair of Levi’s.

  When Runyon was inside, she closed and locked and rechained the door and then turned past him and led him up a flight of stairs that ended in a short hallway. They went down that, through a couple of furnished rooms, and into a huge room at the rear that had been created by knocking out a wall or two and inserting three rows of skylights into the high canted roof. Artist’s studio. A cluttered one full of sculptures and paintings and the tools to create them, including an acetylene torch outfit.

  He didn’t know much about artworks, but he wasn’t impressed by what he saw here. The sculptures, more than twenty of varying sizes, dominated the studio. To his untrained eye they looked like nothing so much as weirdly misshapen root and leaf vegetables made out of scraps of fused metal, glass, straw, and some kind of ropy fibers—hemp, maybe. Big, little; long, short; fat, thin. Some of the tuberous ones had filament-like ends that resembled roots or suckers. The paintings were all over on one side—three or four hung on the wall, a partly finished one on an easel set up on a paint-stained drop cloth, the rest leaning in uneven stacks. Unlike the sculptures, they struck him as amateurish splatterings that had no form or meaning, like the finger paintings kids made in grade school.

  “Do you like them? My sculptures?” The words had an expectant, almost eager inflection. That was why she’d brought him back here—to show off her work.

  He said politely, “Interesting.”

  “ ‘Unique’ is a better word, don’t you think? Anselm Kiefer was an early influence, but of course I’ve refined and developed my own vision and thematic concepts. His pieces tend to be depressive, destructive, while mine are celebrations of the fecundity of life.”

  She might have been speaking a foreign language. Runyon nodded and said nothing.

  “I’ve had eleven shows now and not a single knowledgeable person has compared me to Kiefer. Some of the most eminent critics in the art world have praised my creations as totally original. I’m starting to make a serious name for myself—finally, after years of struggle. Just last month one of my best pieces, Field of Desire, sold for fifteen thousand dollars.”

  “That’s a lot of money.”

  “Yes, but my work will be worth much more someday.”

  No false modesty in her. No humility of any kind.

  “Are the paintings yours, too?”

  She laughed, a half-delighted, half-derisive sound, as if he’d just told a juicy off-color story. “Good God, no. My husband’s. Coy thinks he has artistic talent, but he doesn’t—he’ll never even rise to mediocrity. Self-delusion is just one of his faults.”

  Runyon was silent again.

  “I suppose that sounds as if we don’t get along very well,” she said. “Sometimes we do. And sometimes he makes me so damn mad I could scream. When he calls me drunk from some bar downtown, for instance, bragging about a woman he’s just picked up. He knows that drives me crazy.”

  Still nothing to say.

  “Oh, not the crap about the women. They’re lies, mostly. It’s the drinking and the taunting that gets to me—he’s so damn jealous of my success I swear his skin is developing a green tint.” She sighed elaborately. “You’re wondering why I stay married to him? Habit, I suppose. There’s not much love left, but I do still care for him. God knows why. And of course he stays because now there’s money, more money than either of us ever dreamed I’d be making.”

  Runyon had had enough of her personal life, her success, and her ego. He said, “Your brother-in-law, Mrs. Madison. The reason I’m here.”

  “Well, I have no idea where Troy is. I wish I did. You don’t think I want him to get away, do you?”

  “I hope not.”

  “You know I put up his bail money? Yes, of course you do. I let my husband talk me into it in a weak moment. They both promised me Troy would pay it back, but I didn’t believe it.”

  “Then why agree? Thirty-five hundred is a lot of money.”

  “It used to be,” Arletta Madison said. “Not anymore. I told you, my sculptures are starting to sell for large sums. Very large. And Troy is family. Neither he nor my husband may be worth much, but they’re all the family I have.”

  And she got a bang out of lording it over them, Runyon thought. The kind of woman who used her success like a whip. He didn’t like her much. But then he hadn’t liked Coy Madison much, either.

  He asked, “Can you give me the name of anyone who might help me find him? A friend of his or the woman he lives with?”

  “That dreadful little tramp. She’s the one who got him hooked on meth, you know.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Six or seven years ago. He didn’t use or sell hard drugs then, just a little recreational pot. He had a steady job with Bud before he met her.”

  “Bud?”

  “Bud Linkhauser. Have you talked to him?”

  “This is the first I’ve heard the name.”

  “Coy didn’t say anything about Bud?”

  “No.”

  “He and Troy and Bud grew up together in Bakersfield. I wonder why he didn’t tell you that.”

  Runyon wondered why, too. He said, “Where can I find Bud Linkhauser?”

  “He owns a trucking company in the East Bay. Hayward, I think. I don’t have the address, but Coy probably does.”

  “I’ll find it. What did your brother-in-law do for Linkhauser?”


  “Mechanic.” Condescending note in her voice, as if she considered mechanics several stations beneath her. “Troy has always been good with motors and things. Or he was before that Piper bitch got hold of him.”

  “What can you tell me about her?”

  “Nothing. Except that she was probably the reason he jumped bail.”

  “Talked him into it, you mean?”

  “Well, she wouldn’t want her meal ticket to spend time in prison. Then what would she do for money and drugs? She’s too ugly to sell her body. And probably diseased besides.”

  Runyon had now had enough of Arletta Madison, period. He gave her one of his cards and the standard call-if-you-think-of-anything-else line, and would have gotten out of there quick if she hadn’t caught hold of his arm.

  “Before you go,” she said, “let me show you my latest piece. There, on the table by the door. It’s good, isn’t it—one of my best. I call it Seedpod.”

  He looked at it for all of five seconds on his way out. It was a couple of feet long, round, with tapering ends, constructed of what seemed to be joined blobs of black-painted lead and studded with bits of straw and glass. He had a better name for it than hers. He’d have called it Turd.

  Tamara provided the address and phone number for Linkhauser Trucking in Hayward, but the rest of what she had was sketchy. Jennifer Piper had been arrested five times, twice for prostitution, twice for possession of cocaine, and once for possession of crystal meth; she had no known relatives or associates other than Troy Madison, and Tamara hadn’t been able to fill in her background yet beyond the past six years. Coy Madison had one DUI arrest, Arletta Madison no record of any kind. Background info on Bud Linkhauser would have to wait until tomorrow.

  Runyon saved himself a long, wasted trip to Hayward by calling Linkhauser Trucking first. Bud Linkhauser was away on a run to the Central Valley, he was told, and not expected back until early tomorrow afternoon.

  Bryn’s weekend with her son hadn’t gone well.

  Runyon knew it as soon as she opened the door of her brown-shingled house on Moraga Street. It was in the way she looked at him, the unsmiling pensiveness of her expression. When he asked her about Bobby, her only response was to shake her head.